It wasn't that I had anything against the movies, but they had never
been very important to me, and not once in more than fifteen years of
teaching and writing had I felt the urge to talk about them. I liked
them in the way that everyone else did -- as diversions, as animated
wallpaper, as fluff. No matter how beautiful or hypnotic the images
sometimes were, they never satisfied me as powerfully as words did. Too
much given, I felt, not enough was left to the viewer's imagination, and
the paradox was that the closer movies came to simulating reality, the
worse they failed at representing the world -- which is in us as much as
it is around us. That was why I had always instinctively preferred
black-and-white pictures to color pictures, silent films to talkies.
Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting
images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color
had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it
had robbed the images of their purity. They no longer had to do all the
work, and instead of turning film into the perfect hybrid medium, the
best of all possible worlds, sound and color had weakened the language
they were supposed to enhance.
-- Paul Auster. The Book of Illusions, a novel. New
York: Picador, 2002. p. 14.